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Archive for 2012

We’ve just made some updates to our online/offline mobile editing app. As mentioned in a previous blog post, the ability to attach photos, audio files and video to a feature are all now possible in ArcGIS Online. After setting up the hosted Feature Service in ArcGIS Online and enabling attachments, we extended our mobile editing app to include that functionality. See the demo below:

We continue our work with mobile online and offline editing. At present our focus is on ArcGIS data in Santa Clara, California. Now editable ArcGIS data needs to served as feature layers from a Feature Server. Data which is served from a MapServer instance of ArcGIS server is largely for visualization. In the video below we have set up a web map in ArcGIS Online. We have published to this web map MapServer data served by ArcGIS Server, and an editable feature service hosted from ArcGIS Online. So a combination of editable and non-editable layers. The video shows the web map running in our mobile app on an Android tablet. We demonstrate editing layers in offline mode, then updating the hosted feature service when back online:

We were impressed by the work UDOT are doing with ArcGIS Online. It was great to see them presenting at the Esri User Conference in 2012. Their effort forms a part of the AASHTO initiative.

We’ve been working closely with Region 6 of the Idaho Transportation Dept, developing a mobile application which will form part of their IPLAN project. So transportation is an important part of our own work with mobile and ArcGIS Online. One of our key areas of focus has been to build mobile apps which provide the ability to visualize ArcGIS Online web maps and edit layers in both online and offline modes. We thought it might be interesting to test data from UDOT in a mobile editing application. In this example we focused on milepost data.

Below we walk through the simple steps to use this data. We include first a video of the running application:

Mobile offline editing is something we have written much about. It is also the most common request we receive. We have had in our minds the idea to release a demo version of the application we have shown in many videos. So here we post that mobile app.

This downloadable release is for use on an Android tablet. The application can also be run on an iPad, contact us for more information. Before installing the mobile ArcGIS Online app, please watch the video below which shows the various workflows:

We mentioned in a previous blog post that we have started work on building a version of Esri’s Water Utility Mobile Map but targeting iOS and Android. We thought it might be interesting to share where we are in the development process. The video below shows the first phase of the work.

Let us just point out, we are not using Esri’s Water Utility Mobile Map layers at the moment. We are building a mobile app against the requirements we listed in our original functional spec article, using layers and services we have available. These we will switch when we have the core application completed.

Mobile ArcGIS Online App

Our goal is to make the mobile ArcGIS Online app clean looking and simple to use. It loads on startup a configuration file which sets UI elements. This is a file users can edit themselves. We’ve tried to avoid a cluttered interface, so maximum real estate is devoted to the map. Workflows we will make intuitive. The video shows how we have incorporated online and offline modes. So maps and layers are loaded either from the web, or from sources stored on the devices itself.

Mobile App for ArcGIS Online Next Phase

We will keep moving forward with the mobile app. Next we will be adding online and offline editing capabilities. That will form the centre piece of the next demo.

ArcGIS Online offers many possibilities for building mobile and Web based mapping applications. Applications targeted at GIS professionals and non-GIS users. As a GIS development company, we have focused much of our energy on building this next generation of applications targeted at, and integrated, with ArcGIS Online.

ArcGIS Online is Exciting

GIS has been a niche. From desktop to Web, it has been a technology and acronym that few understand. We have long hoped the use of the technology would broaden and that the acronym would be less used. Many GIS-focused organisations, including ESRI, have begun to change the language their externally facing folk now speak. This is in part due to ArcGIS Online. Web maps, which are the raw material of ArcGIS Online, have a very broad appeal. We can talk, and will in later posts, about intelligent maps, story maps. Maps and geo-data targeted at non-GIS users.

We have been developing mobile ArcGIS online maps for some time. Editing has been at the forefront of our recent work. Many of our clients are looking for tools which allow mobile workers to edit features (add, edit, delete) while in the field. Disconnected mode, where the mobile user has no wi-fi connectivity, is an additional area of interest. To date there are no robust offline solutions in place. ESRI have plans for native targeted releases next year. Our key interest is in cross platform, or a single code base which runs on multiple devices – iOS, Android etc. We turned to the much maligned Mobile Flex for a solution. Actually I should say, the now less appreciated Mobile Flex – but we still love it!

The next two sections are a very rough starter for developers trying to do what we show in the video; online offline editing in ArcGIS online. More hints than a step by step guide. But hey, it would be less fun if we gave the game away. Actually you would not understand it as well if we held your hand completely. For those just wondering about online offline editing in ArcGIS online jump to the video.

Stepping into Mobile Development

In early 2011 we began to turn our attention seriously from development for the PC Web to mobile. Blackberry released their excellent, but not well received, Playbook. As a first step into mobile GIS development we built and launched a mobile ArcGIS viewer to the Blackberry App World. Accompanying this release we wrote a paper for ESRI’s ArcUser publication on the development process, available at this link.